Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cell culture flask for culturing a cell using a culture solution, particularly to a cell culture flask enabling to culture a cell without any contamination, to automatically introduce and discharge the culture solution or gases and to be stacked in turn, and a cell culture device having the same.
Background of Technique
Cell culture comprises aseptically cutting off tissue sections from multicellular organisms and providing nutritive components to them, followed by incubation for cell proliferation in a vessel. The tissues of plants can be immortally proliferated.
A cell culture method includes a coverglass method, a flask method, a rotating tube method and the like. Generally, endosperm, leukocyte or spleen extracts are used to promote the growth of cultured tissues while its essential materials are not clearly elucidated yet. Recently, an antibiotic or an eagle culture solution containing vitamins and amino acids are often used.
The tissue culture permits a single cell to culture to a cell population, a small organ or a plant tissue.
The culture of living cells in a test tube is performed for various purposes, for example, recovery of additional by-products generated by cellular metabolisms, preparation of virus vaccines, culture of cells to fabricate an artificial organ, production of medicines by manipulating genes of an animal cell, breeding of a plant by cell fusion.
In general, the culture of animal cells requires culture media containing nutrients such as amino acids, sugars, inorganic nutrients and vitamins, and their culture conditions are complicated. The plant cells have high viability due to their photosynthesis capabilities compared with animal cells, and thus it is easy to culture them but their proliferation rate is slow.
For efficient culture of the animal cells, the cell culture methods according to cell properties have been intensively studied. As results, the cell culture methods based on the characteristics of each cell such as hybridomas and embryonic stem cells were developed and widely utilized. However, a mass culture method of adhesive cells such as fibroblastoids and epithelial-like cells is not well established yet, which has some problems that its culture yield is so low and its prolonged culture is difficult.
A predetermined space for culturing cells, a culture solution for supplying nutritions to them, and various gases are required for cell culture. Certainly, it is also the same in the plant cells.
Particularly, the culture solutions and various gases are introduced into the culture space and used for culturing cells, following the periodical exchange with new ones to maintain the cell tissues in a fresh condition.
Therefore, a cell culture device is essentially provided with a construction to supply and discharge the culture solutions and various gases continuously and smoothly.
For the exchange of the culture solutions, a method utilizes a pipet to suck the culture solutions, to introduce and discharge them into the culture space. However, it is inefficient due to a possibility involving the cells in discharged culture solution and a difficulty of smooth exchange of the culture solution.
According to another conventional method, there is a method that the culture space is provided with an inlet port at one side thereof through which a predetermined amount of culture solution is introduced by an automatic or manual system, and with an outlet port at the other side thereof through which the culture solution used is discharged in the same manner.
In this method, a foreign substance could be introduced through the inlet port or the outlet port, thereby contaminating the cells. This method is also inconvenient because a user always participates in operation of the cell culture device. Furthermore, the mass cell culture is impossible due to the low efficiencies of the surface area caused from the use of the single device.